The App Store and its approval process is one of Apple’s biggest headaches and one of its biggest black eyes (and will be around, causing trouble long after the antenna issue is resolved). Apps get denied just because some prickly worker is having a bad day, despite being identical in offerings to other, approved apps, or someone at Cupertino changes their mind and pulls a previously approved app. But HTML is a lovely thing, as Google demonstrates with their "apps," and now there's a whole new app store for you to check out.

Over at Techdirt, our attention is directed toward OpenAppMkt, a clearinghouse site where iPhone users can find and install links to HTML pages that run as apps on your phone. Of course, these aren't really apps in the strict sense of downloading a stand-alone game or utility that takes up memory in your iPhone. They're HTML-based portals that will run as long as you have Internet connectivity. Since a great number of popular apps like Google Maps, IMDB, Wikipanion, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, and on and on and on, require some Internet connectivity to perform anyway, this isn't that big of a deal.

Put that aside for a moment and you realize that there are possibly dozens of apps that you'd like to have on your iPhone, but they haven't been approved, and you don't want to tinker with jailbreaking. You don't want the hassle of possibly bricking your phone and having to perform a factory restore and lose all your app data; plus, you don't want the security risks. At OpenAppMkt, you have a choice of Navigation, Lifestyle, Music, Reference, Productivity, Books, Weather, Games, Utilities and more. Since there aren't as many apps as the official App Store sports, finding and navigating is easier to accomplish. Plus, if you can work HTML coding better than the iPhone SDK, getting that app idea into iPhone users' handsets just got a few steps easier.

And these aren't just any random developers working on new and improved jiggle apps either (though there are some of those). Google has a Google Voice "app" in the store, Conde Nast Digital has New Yorker and Reddit "apps," and there's more. CNN, CNET, Last.fm, NPR, Ars Technica, are just some of the bigger names represented. Depending on how well these sources market both their official App Store offerings as well as their OpenAppMkt choices, we might just be seeing more of this in the future.